Longer render times

I'll get to right to the point,what is it that some of you are doing that results in such long render times? I've seen People comment that their render took hours or even days to finish. It is extremely high render setting and/or complex lighting or something else. and does long render time equal amazing results.

Comments

The quantity of items in a scene
The number of said items with transparency
The type of lighting
The type of shadows
The output size of the render
The quality settings of the render
The speed of the system
The number of cpus in the system
The amount of RAM in the system

All of the above factor into how long things take. I've had renders that took almost a week (rendered at 9600x5400) with hundreds of figures. ;)

The quantity of items in a scene
The number of said items with transparency
The type of lighting
The type of shadows
The output size of the render
The quality settings of the render
The speed of the system
The number of cpus in the system
The amount of RAM in the system

All of the above factor into how long things take. I've had renders that took almost a week (rendered at 9600x5400) with hundreds of figures. ;)

Good God. I've let renders run overnight while I slept, and was annoyed if they weren't finished by the time I woke up. I can't imagine waiting an entire week for one to finish.

You'd have hated Bryce back around 2000 or so. A week was a normal render time for it back then, and some renders took as long as a month.

Oh don't rremind me. I had ne render I actually used spot render in overlapping suqares, to get it to fully render, and having finished the render, found there was a fault on it (which never did get corrected)

The quantity of items in a scene
The number of said items with transparency
The type of lighting
The type of shadows
The output size of the render
The quality settings of the render
The speed of the system
The number of cpus in the system
The amount of RAM in the system

Another biggie, particularly when using LuxRender as the rendering engine, is the use of volumetrics (e.g., real glass with caustics or homogenous volumes like fog effects). Even the basic surface/material type (e.g., highly glossy or specular items take longer to clear up than matte items) can have marked affects on rendering time.

My computer is single-core, 1.6 GHz, 3 GB RAM, with a so-so integrated video card. Bottom line is, I guess I'm lucky it can run DS4 at all...

My render settings: for test renders, I usually use the default render settings (shading rate of 1.0). I don't do OpenGL renders because they sometimes crash my system. For better renders, I use a shading rate of anywhere from 0.5 (fair quality) to 0.2 (best quality), and sometimes I'll increase pixel samples to 16. My scenes usually use UberEnvirontment2-based lighting, and often have more than one Genesis figure with transmapped hair (and sometimes transmapped plants too). Haven't gotten into volumetrics yet.

My renders take anywhere from 20 minutes to 24 hours. They seem faster now in DS4.5 than they were in DS4.0...usually no more than a few hours.

once it gets done doing whatever it's doing when you first load a scene, manipulating things is faster.

In DS3 and early versions of DS4, the "Optimizing Images" phase of the rendering process occurred only when you clicked the render button. Now, in more recent version of DS4 (and certainly release 4.5) this process occurs when a texture is first loaded. This cuts down on a the chance that rendering will be interrupted by a tdlmake.exe error. It does, however, mean that upon first loading a saved scene your computer can be quite busy for awhile. If you look in your task manager and the processes tab (windows) or Activity Monitor (osx) you can see the various tdlmake processes running.

Reflections also increase render times. In the scene with the 15 hr render time, I had raytraced shadows, transmapped hair and feathers, AND a champagne glass with reflection and refraction effects. Dialing raytrace bounces up to 6+ makes renders happen in geologic time. This is why a lot of people use reflection maps to fake reflection effects rather than use reflective surfaces and grow old waiting for the render.

I have run a few Reality renders (remote Luxrender actually), and I won't go into more details about how that goes as I'm a newbie there. Because everything is so much more "real" in an unbiased render with no phony constructs like distant lights, it naturally takes forever.